more than this, many felt that the practical involvement of the university, regardless of its precise political shading, was itself a betrayal of the old-fashioned ideals of pure, disinterested intellectualism. J. F. A. Pyre, writing about the university in 1920, took issue with Van Hise’s view that the university should be conceived as “an asset of the state.” This, he said, was an excessively materialistic view of its function and downgraded the tradition of disinterested and autonomous learning, to the ultimate cost of the university.
